External BLOB Storage Provider (EBS)
Posted
Tuesday, January 22, 2008 8:31 PM
by
Itay Shakury
I think AJAX stole the spotlight with MOSS SP1.. The feature I'm most excited with is External BLOB Storage Provider (EBS).
"A large proportion of data files are represented as unstructured binary files—that is, binary large object (BLOB) data files. SQL Server offers less of a gain for binary data than for structured data, so your server farm might gain cost savings by using an external data store to contain your binary data files."
So now we can store big files in regular file system storage, but still benefit from SharePoint's file management features.
There are consequences, and it does seem quite challenging to implement (anyone said COM..?), But I think this is an important feature that everyone should know.
More info on the WSS SDK:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb802976.aspx
BTW, This WAS available before SP1 with KB938499..